There have been several notable blog posts and articles about Robert McCammon’s work in the past week or so. Here are some of the more interesting links:
I know many of us would love to see some film adaptations!
Tomislav Tikulin has just turned in the first cover for Robert McCammon’s classic, Baal, which has been fully proofread and is on schedule for release this fall.
Next week, Rick will be in our offices to sign and inscribe copies of The Five. While he’s still here signing, we’ll be shipping copies of the trade hardcover. (The limited, which is nearly sold out, will ship as soon as the slipcases are in our offices.)
Posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 at 10:19 am.
Stephen King has a column in the June 3, 2011, issue of Entertainment Weekly with his reading list for the summer. He includes The Five in the twelve books profiled. You can see a scan of the page by clicking on the image to the left, but here’s what he wrote:
THE FIVE Robert McCammon
One of the finest horror-suspense writers of the late ’70s and ’80s returns with a riveting novel of a rock band (the Five) pursued by a mentally unstable Army vet who’s offended by one of their videos. It’s scary; it’s also a soaring anthem to the redemptive power of rock & roll. You probably won’t find it in your bookstore, so go to your (hopefully nonmalevolent) computer and click on subterraneanpress.com.
Robert McCammon will be signing copies of The Five (and other books) at the Alabama Booksmith in Birmingham, AL, on Tuesday, June 14, 2011, beginning at 4 PM.
From the Alabama Booksmith website:
If you would like to reserve a copy, and we do not have your information on file, you may send it to our easy, secure and encrypted web form by Clicking Here
If you would like to reserve a copy or copies, and we already have your information on file, please Click Here
Alabama Booksmith
2626 19th Place South
Birmingham, Alabama 35209
Fan Kazuki Tamada has sent in four more illustrations inspired by Speaks the Nightbird, They Thirst, and The Night Boat. You can see the images on Kazuki’s Fan Art page or you can click on the images below.
Speaks the Nightbird 2 |
Speaks the Nightbird 3 |
They Thirst |
The Night Boat |
The season 8 finale of the CW TV show One Tree Hill featured a lengthy quote from Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life. The episode, entitled “This Is My House, This Is My Home,” was written and directed by Mark Schwahn, who is a long-time fan of McCammon’s work. Here’s the scene as described by a fan on Facebook:
…the little boy Jamie was narrating a passage about living in a magic time and town etc and they pan up and show him reading “Boy’s Life”.
Here’s the passage quoted:
You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.
After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.
That’s what I believe.
The episode can be viewed on Hulu.com.
Subterranean Press has posted this update for The Five:
Robert McCammon’s new thriller, The Five, the one called “his best novel ever” by Stephen King, and “infused with power and passion, and laced with psychological horror and razor-sharp tension” in a Starred Review in Publishers Weekly, is headed into its second printing, less than a week after it started shipping.
(Important Note: For those have ordered signed or inscribed copies, Mr. McCammon will be here in early June to sign your books, which will ship immediately thereafter. Even though we just ordered a second printing, we have held back a number of firsts so individual customers may still order the more collectible printing of this major novel.)
The Five may be in short supply out in the world for a few weeks. We’re sitting on purchase orders for thousands of copies, which will be filled as soon as the second printing arrives in our warehouse.Posted on Monday, May 16th, 2011 at 9:47 am.
Robert McCammon’s new contemporary novel, The Five, will soon be available (some Amazon pre-orders have already been shipped). If you’d like to help promote The Five, here are image files for bookmarks and a “shelf-talker” (when printed and folded in half, the “shelf-talker” can be inserted under books on a shelf in a bookstore, with the bottom half of the image displayed). The files are 300 DPI images, suitable for high-quality printing. If you can print these and take them to bookstores, conventions, etc., for distribution, that would help spread the word of the book’s release.
Thanks to Vincent Chong for the use of his artwork and to Dave Ballard, who put these together!
 |
 |
If you can’t see the images above, you can right-click on the URLs below:
Robert McCammon’s World Fantasy Award-nominated short story “Best Friends” will be reprinted in the upcoming anthology Demons: Encounters with the Devil and His Minions, Fallen Angels, and the Possessed. The anthology is edited by John Skipp, who also edited the recent Zombies and Werewolves anthologies. The trade paperback will be published by Black Dog & Leventhal in September 2011.
The book can be pre-ordered from Amazon here. The complete Table of Contents can be found here.
“Best Friends,” which originally appeared in Night Visions IV, can be read here.
It is a grim, gusty and rainy day here.
I’m writing this as we near one week since the devastating tornadoes and storms ripped through my home town and my home state.
I wanted everyone to know how much I appreciate your well-wishes and voices of concern. I was out of town when this happened. My family is fine. My home is fine. Everyone I know made it through. But I wanted to post some pictures and talk a little bit about what I’ve seen, what I’ve felt, and what I think.
My God. Why?
Like you, I saw the destruction from a distance. I saw it in the news media. The worst of the storms hit at least an hour away from where I live. Tuscaloosa, of course, was mangled beyond recognition. Other small communities, like Pratt City, have been nearly removed from the map altogether. But when I got home on Saturday night aroung 10:30, I undeniably felt the silence of the shock. It was an eerie feeling that even a horror writer cannot describe. It was the edge of something. It was the end of something. It was awesomely and horribly final.
I pulled into the parking lot of my apartment complex and found huge logs piled up. I found crushed cars, as you can see in the photographs. Evidently fifteen or so massive trees went down, and many cars were demolished. My place is absolutely fine, no wind damage at all. And this is the weirdest part, and the random nature of destruction: I left two cigar butts in an ashtray on my balcony, and in all this maelstrom from Hell and the falling of trees those cigar butts did not move one inch.
This morning I took my camera and went out. I could have taken hundreds of pictures like the ones I’ve posted. These were taken in the parking lot of my complex and within two miles of where I live. Old trees were uprooted and the root systems eight and nine feet tall. Roofs were shattered. Cars slammed down so hard their tires exploded. Tangles of power lines fell to the earth, and had to be reeled out of the way so people could get to these communities to help…and let me tell you, guys, that if you don’t believe in miracles you need to wake up because the death count was way low from what it might have been and should have been in all this destruction.
Interesting picture from a local church. “Was God In The Storm?”
I will not begin to set myself up as someone who could answer that question. All I know is, for all this suffering and death and broken hearts and broken bodies…people are still moving forward with hope, even in the silence of the shock.
As I understand it, people staggered into local hospitals carrying dead children, and with their own arms and legs broken. People are still missing. The atmosphere has changed. Cell phones are not working correctly…the signals are erratic, and the voices float in and out as if you’re speaking to someone underwater. In an instant, lives were forever changed and destinies altered. And remember…I am an hour away from the main scenes of horrific carnage and absolute destruction, where entire blocks…and neighborhoods, really…were scooped from the earth and scattered before the storms.
Last night I lay in bed and listened to the wind. A soft breeze, then. In it I could distantly hear a siren. I wondered if someone’s heart had not finally taken too much, and stopped beating in the silence of the shock.
I understand also that many, many household pets are missing. Just gone. And many pets wander the streets searching for houses and masters that are no longer there.
Please pray for the people of my home town and my home state. We are suffering here, in so many ways. But in so many ways also we have come together and are starting to dig out of this. Things are forever changed, yes…but people move forward because there is no going back.
I will remember this for the rest of my life. This, again, is beyond the ability of a horror writer to describe. There are no words for this. There is no way to adequately express this, even between people who have seen their homes destroyed and their children and loved ones taken from them in an instant.
There are no words.
There is only silence.
God bless you for your help.
Rick.
(Click on the images to view larger versions.)
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
